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Stone Links: Is Doping Cheating?

By A.c. Lee September 5, 2012 6:29 pmSeptember 5, 2012 6:29 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Human enhancement has been high on the minds of philosophers in the wake of the Lance Armstrong affair. At The Atlantic, Evan Selinger wonders how the argument “that Armstrong still deserves our sympathy even if he is guilty of using banned substances” might affect our approach to problems like sustainability and climate change. Feeling bad for Lance, Selinger suggests, is roughly analogous to “feeling bad for the present state of the world,” and thus less conducive to attacking its problems.

At 13.7, Alva Noë encourages us to take a much longer and broader historical view of human enhancement before we condemn Armstrong. He argues that “we are technologists by nature,” and should attend to what our scorn for Armstrong’s actions might “tell us about ourselves.” Answering his critics in a follow up, Noë distinguishes between two kinds of cheating: breaking rules that are constitutive of a game and those which are not. Since Armstrong’s transgressions are of the latter kind, we should judge him differently than someone who, say, takes a taxi to the finish line.

At Talking Philosophy, Russell Blackford considers the view that there is no meaningful distinction at all between “enhancement” and ordinary kinds of “therapy, healthcare, or medical treatment.” While sympathetic to the idea as far as it goes, Blackford points out that the question of “enhancement” ultimately refers us back to the classic problem of “the good life.” And when conflicts arise between rival conceptions of the good life in liberal societies, where there is no agreement on such a standard, and the good life is typically seen as a purely individual matter, it’s “not so obvious that the state can be neutral.”

The Picture Theory of Wittgenstein: Histories of philosophy typically emphasize the “linguistic turn” taken in the 20th century, so it’s useful to be reminded that one of the thinkers most associated with that program, Ludwig Wittgentstein, was arguably more interested in visual, not verbal, modes of thinking and inquiry. In an article at The New Statesman, philosopher and Wittgenstein biographer Ray Monk argues that Wittgenstein, following Freud, believed in the “primordiality” of pictures in both formulating and understanding our deepest thoughts. This is well-illustrated, Monk thinks, by a recent exhibition called “Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Photography.” In particular, a composite portrait of the philosopher and his three sisters superimposed on one another, captures all too clearly the essence of Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblance, ” in which concepts like “soul, justice, truth” are better understood as “captured by a picture” than as a strict “relationship between a word and an object.”

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.